Lion of Jordan (43 page)

At about 9.00 a.m. Hussein rushed to his army headquarters after being informed that the Israeli offensive against Egypt had begun. Shortly before his arrival, General Riad had received a cable from Cairo; it was from Field Marshal Abdel Hakim Amer, the first vice-president and deputy supreme commander of the Egyptian armed forces. Amer was a fool who largely owed his rapid promotion to his friendship with Nasser. A major and a Free Officer during the revolution of 1952, Amer became minister of war two years later and was promoted to field marshall in 1958. He was inexperienced in military affairs, corrupt, often drunk and prone to wishful thinking. He was responsible for the lack of preparedness of the Egyptian air force on the eve of battle.

Amer's cable to Riad was a pack of lies. It said that the enemy's planes had started to bomb Egypt's air bases, that the attack had failed, and that 75 per cent of the enemy's aircraft had been destroyed or put out of action. It also said that Egypt's forces had engaged the enemy in Sinai and taken the offensive on the ground. On the basis of these alleged successes, Amer ordered Riad to open a new front against the enemy and to launch offensive operations. By the time Hussein arrived at the headquarters, Riad had already given the orders for the artillery to move to the front lines and bombard Israeli air bases and other targets; for an infantry brigade to occupy the Israeli enclave on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem; for the two Egyptian commando battalions to infiltrate enemy territory from the West Bank at dusk; and for the air force to be put on combat alert and commence air strikes immediately. Although these decisions were made in his absence, Hussein made no attempt to cancel them or to delay the opening of fire until the information from Cairo could be checked. Jordan was thus committed to war by the decision of an Egyptian general who was acting on the orders of an idiot in Cairo.

Shortly after his arrival at army headquarters, Hussein was given the first of three Israeli messages urging him not to get involved in the war that had broken out very early that morning. Israel's main enemy was Egypt and the government most emphatically did not want war with Jordan, hence the message that was transmitted through three different channels. The first channel was the Norwegian general with the implausible name of Odd Bull, chief of staff of the United Nations Truce Supervisory Organization (UNTSO). Bull was asked to transmit a message to Hussein expressing the hope of the Israeli government that he would not join in the war. If he stayed out, Israel would not attack him, but if, on the other hand, he chose to come in, Israel would use against him all the means at its disposal. At first Bull hesitated: ‘This was a threat, pure and simple, and it is not the normal practice of the UN to pass on threats from one government to another.' But this message seemed so important that he quickly sent it to Hussein the same morning.
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‘I did receive the message,' Hussein confirmed,

but it was too late in any event. I had already handed over the command of the army to the unified Arab command. There was a unified Arab command with an Egyptian general in army headquarters in charge of the Jordanian armed forces
as a part of the defensive effort. The Syrians were not ready, the Iraqis were far away, eventually they moved even before the Syrians and already the first wave had gone in from Jordan into Israel when the UN general called to say that there is a message to keep out of it. I said: ‘Tell him it's too late.' I don't know that the message made any difference because at that time I had these options: either join the Arabs, or Jordan would have torn itself apart. A clash between Palestinians and Jordanians might have led to Jordan's destruction and left the very clear possibility of an Israeli takeover of at least the West Bank and Jerusalem. We did the best we could in the hope that somebody would stop this madness before it developed any further and help us out.
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Israel conveyed the same message to Hussein through Colonel Daoud, his representative to the Mixed Armistice Commission, and through the American ambassador to Tel Aviv. Dean Rusk, the American secretary of state at the time, wrote in his memoirs that they tried hard to persuade Hussein not to become embroiled in the fighting, but he said, ‘I am an Arab and I have to take part.' As an Arab, wrote Rusk, Hussein felt honour-bound to assist Egypt, especially since Israel had struck first. Rusk thought that they could have got the Israelis to stay their hand, but Hussein insisted on getting in: ‘It was one of the sadder moments of this crisis because it certainly was not in Jordan's interest to attack Israel, then lose the West Bank and the old city of Jerusalem.'
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Jordan did not declare war on Israel but opened hostilities very gently at 9.45 a.m. with isolated shots across the armistice lines in Jerusalem. From Jerusalem the shooting spread to other fronts and involved artillery and tanks. The ministers who had a positive image of the Hashemite dynasty found it difficult to reconcile these acts of belligerence with their experience of coexistence. They hoped that Hussein was making a token gesture of solidarity with Egypt. Abba Eban, the foreign minister, wrote in his autobiography about the Hashemite dynasty: ‘There was nothing here of the inhuman virulence which marked the attitude of other Arab nationalists toward Israel's existence. Even in wars, an unspoken assumption of ultimate accord hovered over the relations between Israel and Jordan. General Uzi Narkiss, commander of our central front, described the first artillery bombardment of Monday morning in his diary as a “salvo to uphold Jordanian honour”. But the Jordanian capture of Government House, together with the encirclement of Israeli positions on Mount Scopus, had a far more serious effect. Unlike the
dispatch of shells, these measures changed the strategic position to Israel's peril.'
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Jordan also launched an air attack on Israel on Monday morning. This was utterly pathetic compared to that of the IAF on the Egyptian air bases. The Jordanian Air Force was so tiny – a fleet of twenty-two Hawker Hunters – that it could not carry out any large-scale operations on its own. General Riad realized this and issued an order at 9.00 a.m. for a joint Jordanian–Syrian–Iraqi attack on Israel's air bases. Persistent Iraqi and Syrian delays, however, meant that the attack could not be launched until 11.50 a.m. The Jordanian Hawker Hunters took part in the bombing of air bases and other military targets but, because the Israeli planes were in action, the damage they inflicted was minimal. The Syrian Air Force made one ineffectual sortie and the Iraqi Air Force did not fare much better. By this time the IAF had completed the destruction of the Egyptian Air Force and could turn its full might against the three smaller ones. Amman's airport was bombed while all the Hawker Hunters were refuelling and rearming; they were destroyed on the ground before they could take off. Fifteen minutes later much of Syria's Air Force and the two Iraqi squadrons at H3 suffered the same fate. Israel was now effectively the only air power in the region. By knocking out the Arab air forces so swiftly on the first day, Israel achieved complete mastery in the air and proceeded to use it to very good effect in the land battles that followed. In all, 400 enemy planes were destroyed on the first day and that basically sealed the fate of the Arab armies. Never in the history of modern warfare did air power play so decisive a role in determining the outcome of a conflict.

Israeli pilots appear to have targeted Hussein personally. Zaid Rifa'i, chief of protocol at the royal palace, was an eyewitness. He saw two Israeli Mystères approaching the palace: one was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed; the other swept down and fired two missiles that penetrated the conference hall. It came full circle and headed back to the palace at full speed: ‘This time, it machine-gunned the King's office at point-blank range with a precision and knowledge of its target that was stupefying. Then, finally it disappeared.' Rifa'i called Hussein at army headquarters to report the incident. Hussein only asked if anyone had been wounded. The answer was no. ‘In that case, it's all right,' Hussein said calmly, and hung up.
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Jack O'Connell, the CIA station chief, took the incident more seriously. He reported it to his superiors and asked them to tell the
Israelis to knock it off. A message was slipped to the Israelis, and there were no further air attacks threatening King Hussein.
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The generals were less indulgent than the ministers towards Hussein and saw no reason to accord him immunity after he had ignored Israel's repeated warnings and initiated hostilities. Once war had broken out, it developed a momentum of its own and offered hope to those with thoughts of territorial expansion. Ezer Weizman, the head of the General Staff Division of the IDF, was a military hawk and an ardent nationalist who was rearing to go once he had the scent of battle in his nostrils. In his memoirs he described his feelings at the time with remarkable frankness:

The ‘little king', the darling of Israeli politics, Hussein of Jordan, was making vulture-like sounds. Nasser at least had guts: he put a noose around Israel's sensitive neck, threw down the gauntlet – and got his due deserts. Hussein waited. Israel sent him reassuring messages. ‘Sit still and don't worry. We're not going for you.' But Nasser filled Hussein's head full of fanciful tales, telling him Tel Aviv was in flames and Israel was on the verge of collapse, and it would soon be time to divide up the spoils. As soon as he heard ‘loot', Hussein lost his head and bounded to the carcass for his hunk of meat. Thus Hussein altered the course of the contest, giving it an additional national and historical dimension: as a result of the war, we returned to our ancestral home, to Jerusalem and the Land of the Bible.

At the first reports that the Jordanians had opened fire, there was an inclination in the General Staff to make light of it: ‘Hussein's just pretending, to keep in with Nasser; but he doesn't mean it in earnest.' I must admit that I very much hoped he was in earnest. As long as we had been forced to go to war, I wanted it to give me the chance to write a wish on a slip of paper to be stuffed into one of the cracks in the Western Wall. It soon became clear that Hussein was in earnest – and we were in even greater earnest. The conflagration spread, and the Israeli forces set about restoring Jerusalem, Judaea and Samaria to the Jewish people.
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Following the destruction of the Jordanian Air Force, Israel launched a limited counter-offensive with the aim of repelling the Jordanians from Government House, defending Mount Scopus and capturing key strategic positions around Jerusalem. The next forty-eight hours of fighting on the Jordanian front consisted of a catalogue of errors committed by General Riad, each one worse than the last. The Jordanians had
a carefully laid plan for the defence of the West Bank. ‘Operation Tariq' called for concentrating Jordan's forces around Jerusalem, encircling the Jewish side of the city, capturing Mount Scopus, holding on to it until the UN imposed a ceasefire and then using it as a bargaining counter. The Jordanian officers knew the topography of the West Bank well, and this plan was tailored to make the most of their limited military capability. But they were compelled to carry out the orders of an Egyptian general who was a complete newcomer to this front and who acted on the basis of orders from Cairo. Jordan's armoured corps was divided into two brigades of M48 tanks, the 40th and the 60th. Riad's worst blunder was to order the 60th armoured brigade to move from Jericho to Hebron and the 40th brigade to move from the Damia Bridge to Jericho. The intention was that the Jordanian brigades would join up with an Egyptian force that was supposed to be advancing towards Beersheba. But this victorious Egyptian march was simply a myth that subjected the Jordanian Army to muddled and self-defeating manoeuvres and exposed it to unrelenting attacks from the IAF. The Israelis found Riad's juggling of armoured brigades in broad daylight and without air cover to be extremely strange, to say the least.
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At dawn on Tuesday, the second day of the war, the full extent of Jordan's reverses became apparent. At a meeting at 5.30 that morning, General Riad offered Hussein the following options: try for a ceasefire through diplomatic channels or order an immediate retreat so as to fall back at dusk to the East Bank of the Jordan. Riad added, ‘If we don't decide within the next twenty-four hours, you can kiss your army and all of Jordan goodbye! We are on the verge of losing the west bank; all our forces will be isolated and destroyed.' Hussein thought for a moment and then asked the Egyptian general to contact Nasser to find out what he thought. Half an hour later, they got through to Nasser over the regular public telephone system. Egypt had at its disposal an ultramodern system but the equipment sat idle in Cairo. This was the famous conversation that the Israelis intercepted and publicized round the world. The two leaders agreed to accuse America and Britain of giving Israel air support. ‘The Big Lie' badly backfired on its inventors by alienating the two governments and public opinion. Hussein maintained, however, that when he charged America and Britain with participation on the side of Israel, he actually believed it.
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In the same conversation Hussein and Nasser also discussed the
situation on the Jordanian front. At Nasser's suggestion, Riad sent a written report. Riad's coded cable read as follows:

The situation on the west bank is becoming desperate. The Israelis are attacking on all fronts. We are bombed day and night by the Israeli air force and can offer no resistance because the major part of our combined air power has been put out of commission.

Therefore, we now have three possible solutions:

1. We can call for a political solution in the hope of bringing hostilities to an immediate end. This solution must come from a foreign source – the United States, Soviet Russia, or the UN Security Council.